Mundane Monday: Rainbows

I don’t think I would have ever expected to call rainbows mundane. But they are getting that way during this rainy CA winter. Last week alone 3 out of 5 mornings had rainbows.

On Monday I was driving my son to school and saw this one as we rounded the corner, driving away from our house.

Waverly Park

Taken through the car windshield with a phone camera after I pulled over to the side of the road, the photo doesn’t do it justice . . . or so one might reasonably think. But in fact, the morning was pretty much that dark and gloomy, the air gray and humid.

Prisma helps a little bit, defines the clouds and trees while keeping the watery vibe. But that blue sky, uh, that’s a complete invention of the app:

On Thursday, my husband and I went geocaching in a park next to a school. We went to find a cache that had been logged as missing and which had been recently replaced (Caching streak update: I am now on 403 consecutive days with a geocache find!) We ended up finding two caches: the old one, which wasn’t missing after all, and the new one added by the cache owner to replace it. Then it started raining, and this appeared:

Serra Park

On the way home I tried to get a better view of it, and a better picture, with real blue sky as the sun peeked in and out. I only partly succeeded, but I could see pictures like these making their way into a brochure about the condo complex:

There was another rainbow on Friday, a double, according to a friend who posted a picture on Facebook. I was too early or late for that one, because I didn’t see it at all in real life. Fittingly, it was in the town of Sunnyvale.

Last summer we saw a rainbow right after landing at the airport in Paris. At the time I thought of it as a good omen for our trip, and spent much of the taxi ride to the hotel trying to get a good picture.

No matter whether you think I succeeded in getting a “good” picture of any of these, none of them fits the stereotype about rainbow pictures–the one with the pot of gold, ice cream, and unicorns that girls of a certain age like to draw on their folders in school. Real rainbows even look a little more “scientific” than I expected, like partial arcs of a circle that you can imagine filling in on the other side of the world; watery lenses focusing the light.

With rainbows, comes rain. And we still desperately need it. May we keep seeing California rainbows for a few more months! (For Photrablogger’s Mundane Monday Challenge #94)

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The Brain—is wider than the Sky

I am a neuroscientist, educator, geocacher, Unitarian-Universalist, amateur violinist, and parent. I have always been fascinated by how people's brains learn, and especially why this process is easier and more fun for some brains than others. This led me to get a PhD in Neuroscience, work in biotech, and then become a science educator and writer.